Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1037 - Chris Kresser
Uploaded: 2017-11-08T23:38:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1037 - Chris Kresser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1037 - Chris Kresser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1037 - Chris Kresser

move over a little bit i see him all right three two one
yes all right welcome back chris what's up man how's things happy to be here
things are good
happy to have you yeah what's the latest and the greatest with you uh new book
came out yesterday
that's always a big one what's it called unconventional medicine and uh give us
the
what's the what are those sheets the back sheet what's that called the the yeah
the back sheet
that works um the biggest challenge we face today is chronic disease and
conventional medicines
failed to address it so we need a new system that's the nutshell and you're
essentially based
um is doing nutrition based uh three components uh ancestral diet and lifestyle
which we've talked
about uh functional medicine and a collaborative practice model that
incorporates health coaches
nutritionists and other allied providers to to offer more support to patients
what does that
mean when you say functional medicine so uh the easiest way to understand it is
it's an approach
that is geared towards addressing the underlying cause of of a problem instead
of just suppressing
the symptoms so you go into the doctor you've got uh high cholesterol usually
given a drug to lower it
statins yeah you got high blood pressure and those are devastating to your
health right statins or
well you know for some people they can be i wouldn't say they're devastating
for everybody and they do
save lives in certain situations but the idea that they're the first thing we
we would do in that
situation that's what's off right that you wouldn't suggest like altering the
diet exactly let's look at why the
cholesterol is high in the first place same thing with like high blood pressure
you go into the doctor
high blood pressure you get a drug to lower it there's rarely any investigation
into why the blood
pressure is high and what are the main factors with high cholesterol because i
know that um it's a big
part of it is hereditary yeah right genetics play a huge role yeah so that
genetics is one for sure
uh but then you have things like poor thyroid function can actually lead to
high cholesterol or ldl particle
number you've got uh infections can do that like h pylori which is the bacteria
that causes ulcer uh you've
got leaky gut intestinal permeability has been shown to do that that's
interesting that you did you talk
about this before but a lot of people are not aware of that that there's
actually gut bacteria that
causes ulcers yeah yeah there's uh it's a it's a cool story actually so you
know uh 20 30 years ago
the the dominant idea was ulcers were caused by stress and things like eating
spicy foods
and a couple australian physicians presented at a conference this notion that
no actually they're
caused by this bacterium called helicobacter pylori and they were literally
laughed off the stage
nobody took them seriously they were ridiculed and they kept going you know
kept doing this research
kept trying to present this idea and nobody would take them seriously finally
one of them swallowed
a vial of of uh solution that had the bacterium in in in it developed an ulcer
as a result and then
treated himself with antibiotics and got rid of the ulcer whoa to prove this is
how committed this guy was
this idea in proving this and finally at that point people started to pay
attention but it still was
another 10 years before that theory was widely accepted and then they
eventually won the nobel prize in
medicine as a result of that discovery so that to me that's a great example of
how groupthink is such
a problem in medicine you know we have a tendency to just like get stuck on the
status quo even though
a core principle of science is uncertainty you know like we don't we we come up
with a hypothesis we have
to be willing to challenge our most cherished views all the time because if we
look at the history of
science it was the history of most people being wrong about most things most of
the time yeah and it's
amazing how many people are still uh operating under information that has been
updated many times over
the past couple of decades absolutely talk to the average person about what you
should eat i mean
they're looking at like the food pyramid from the dr seuss books you know i
mean really yeah or another
one is you probably saw some articles like stents have yes they don't work yeah
i just i just read
that just came out they don't work but they're still massively being used in
part because they get
doctors get paid for that now that's crazy because i thought a stent was like i
thought it propped
open the artery i mean what does it do right and but the question is does that
actually have the desired
effect i mean it was the i think was based on pain wasn't wasn't it and mammograms
prevent we're
supposed to prevent breast cancer right they don't then we saw you know the
huge randomized controlled
trial that showed that they not only do they not prevent breast cancer they may
actually increase
death as a result of unnecessary treatments that come from the mammograms so
what yeah how how would
you get an unnecessary like if you did a mammogram you saw a lump well it's not
always black or white
so it could be a cyst or something on those lines and somebody gets unnecessary
treatment that lends
that leads to an adverse event so i'm just saying it's you know we got to be
humble and realize that
we don't always have the answers and that in 10 years it's going to look really
different than it does
now just like 100 years ago everybody thought they had the answers and you know
we look back on them
and we say how silly you know but we forget that people 100 years ahead are
going to look back on us
with that same you know that you know they're going to shake their heads yeah
it's very unfortunate but
that is a tendency that people have when they've been living their life based
on uh like what they
think is like certain rigid information like this is absolute this is true and
they've been teaching
that that's when it gets especially problematic or writing books about that
yeah and then they just
never want to admit that their book is bullshit and i think that our education
system needs to change
uh medical education because you know you write a textbook and that takes a
long time and then you
know the textbook is used in in in course like the medical schools are still
using the nutrition
textbooks that were probably written in the 70s or the 80s or something and
then we get all these new
studies showing that like cholesterol on the diet makes has no impact you know
on your blood cholesterol
for most people now say that again because for a lot of people here they're
like what did he just say
yeah so uh even the american uh the the standard u.s diet guidelines last year
a lot of people might
have missed this they completely removed any restriction on dietary cholesterol
from the from the u.s diet
guidelines they basically said there's no reason to limit cholesterol on your
diet anymore
now for people who don't know why this is so crazy or how this came to be you
need to go to the new york
times article on how the sugar industry bribed scientists and convinced
scientists to publish faulty or
false information pointing towards saturated fats and cholesterol as being the
cause of heart disease and
heart attacks and all these different ailments so that they could push the
blame away from sugar and
i think they only got paid something like fifty thousand dollars to do it yeah
well which is
amazing to think about how many people that's affected yeah and these i mean
these conflicts of interest are
everywhere it's uh that's a big conflict of interest i mean that's just that's
just crime
right but they did some horrible things to people it totally you know it's
unfortunately pretty normal
in medicine there was a study that just came out a few days ago
it showed that the more gifts doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies the
more expensive the
drugs they prescribe and the more prescriptions they write in general yeah i
would imagine that's true
um my wife's mom was a nurse and she would tell me stories about how they would
take them out to nice
dinners fancy restaurants and everything on the house and it's human nature i
mean you know upton one of my
favorite quotes is from upton sinclair he said it's difficult to get a man to
understand something when
his salary is dependent on him not understanding it that's a great quote yeah
so one more time
dietary cholesterol has no impact yeah well i'll be more specific so in 70
percent of people
eating you know egg yolks and cholesterol and meat and other things doesn't do
anything to your serum
cholesterol the cholesterol levels in your blood in 30 percent of people you'll
get a slight raise in
your ldl cholesterol the so-called bad cholesterol but you'll also get a raise
in your hdl cholesterol
which is the so-called good cholesterol which means there's no net clinical
impact of that in terms of
your risk of heart disease and this is why the u.s finally the last industrialized
uh country to actually do this they finally said okay well we really we just
can't do this anymore
we can't tell you not to eat dietary cholesterol because there's just not any
evidence to support that
what took so long well i think you just referred to one of the reasons you know
conflicts of interest
people that were invested in maintaining the status quo i think also there's
probably uh some concern about
uh losing credibility you know these organ these government organizations if
they told you told us not
to eat cholesterol for so long and then they tell us that we can and it's not a
problem and they do
that with saturated fat you know people stop listening because they just throw
up their hands
they're like i don't know who to believe or what to listen to that saturated
fat is another one
you talk to the average person they think you should restrict your intake of
saturated fat
yeah average person most doctors still and um you know i i think i think there
is some nuance here
and and i you know maybe we talked about this on the last show but where we're
headed in my
opinion with diet nutrition recommendations is from general blanket
recommendations that apply to
everybody to more personalized recommendations that depend on your genetics
your goals your lifestyle
you know uh your health status your age etc so let's take somebody who is
apoe44 which is a you know has a certain genetic haplotype and they have uh you
know they're they're
they're really sensitive to the dietary effects of saturated fat if you have
that genotype and if they
eat how common is that not very common at all um i i can't remember the exact
percent it's below 10 percent
i think it's three three four percent or something like that and if those
people eat a lot of saturated
fat their ldl particle number which we can define if you want to those are the
particles that carry
cholesterol can go up pretty pretty quickly and what we know at least from the
research that we have is that
people who have a much higher ldl particle number can be at higher risk for
heart disease and alzheimer's
um there's some murkiness there because that's just on average you know we don't
know if that that risk
applies to people who are eating you know paleo type of diet doing crossfit
taking care of themselves in
every other way we just know that the general population in the general
population a higher ldlp
leads to a higher risk of these conditions now i know people i'm sorry to
interrupt you but i know
people um some people know this but some people don't what is the difference
between ldl and hdl and
why is one good and one bad well you know just so this could be a standalone
podcast here's here's an
example of how things are changing again um so historically um the idea has
been that ldl which stands
for low density lipoprotein and hdl stands for high density lipoprotein the ldl
the idea was it was bad
has a number of effects that contrib